Every child deserves a quality education that fits his or her individual needs as a student. Public schools are often a one-size-fits-all system, which doesn’t usually provide alternative teaching approaches that so many children need to succeed.

In Oregon, the answer by government has often been to implement more testing, requirements, and bureaucracy to try and hold schools accountable. But such “accountability” hasn’t resulted in more learning, as much as it has tied the hands of teachers and principals with bureaucratic red tape.

School Choice takes the focus off of bureaucracy, and places it onto making sure that our kids get the education they deserve. When parents have the power to allocate their funds to where their own kids are learning more, true accountability is a natural result – whether it’s public, private, or online schooling.

Many districts around the country are already experiencing the power of parent accountability through:

Charter schools (public schools that are privately run and that parents can choose no matter their location)

Education Savings Accounts (sometimes known as opportunity scholarships) which allow students to have their own personal education accounts funded by a major portion of their state allocation to their public school district, allowing them to choose a variety of private schools, tutors, online learning options and more.

Education tax credits (which allow individual taxpayers and businesses to donate to scholarship-granting organizations and to take a tax credit for the donation)

Vouchers (which allow money that would have been spent on a child in public school to follow a child to the private school of his or her parent’s choice)

Homeschooling

Open enrollment (which allows parents to choose public schools outside the district boundary lines of their home residence)

About

School Choice for Oregon is a project of Cascade Policy Institute. Cascade Policy Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research and educational organization that focuses on state and local issues in Oregon. Cascade’s mission is to develop and promote public policy alternatives that foster individual liberty, personal responsibility, and economic opportunity.